Miss Marple is probably the most famous female detective in English literature, she was certainly an original character when she first appeared in print, using psychology and character observation rather than searching for physical clues to solve crimes.

This collection of stories was published posthumously after Christie’s death and brings together the remaining Miss Marple short stories that hadn’t been published in book form before, plus two supernatural stories that didn’t feature Miss Marple.

This is certainly a mixed bag of stories. Sanctuary and Greenshaw's Folly are fully formed stories, with plots and characters that work and carry the reader to the end at a readable pace. Strange Jest is much more a puzzle story than a mystery and suffers from not being a Christie mystery. The other Marple stories here feel rushed and not fully formed, like first-draft stories that were squeezed into a tight word limit. These stories far too often tell the reader what is happening rather than letting the characters and events show the reader what is happening. So often they felt rushed. They weren’t to the standard of other Christie stories, especially the original stories in the very first Marple collection, The Thirteen Problems. In Miss Marple Tells a Story Christie shows her ear for dialogue, the story is written completely in Miss Marple’s voice, solely her voice speaking. It shows how well Christie knew her character; unfortunately the story itself is too short and slight to build any plot.

The two non Miss Marple stories here are examples of Christie’s supernatural stories that she wrote periodically throughout her career. The Dressmaker’s Doll is overly long, dragging out the situation and distracting from the ending. In a Glass Darkly is a much darker story in tone, but the neat ending, where order is restored, is a let-down.

Christie’s short stories were best when she gave herself time and space to develop plots and characters, thus making her longer short stories often the better ones. This is very much the case here.

This is a collection for committed Miss Marple fans who want to read all the stories she appears in. If you’re new to Miss Marple fiction there are much better places to start.

Find it here on Amazon